By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
MANCHESTER – Adam Montgomery’s defense team lost a skirmish in his murder trial Thursday when Hillsborough Superior Court Judge Amy Messner allowed evidence that could link him to cutting up his daughter with a power tool.
Lawyers for Adam Montgomery, the Manchester man accused of murdering his five-year-old daughter and hiding her body for months, tried to stop Manchester Police Detective Max Rahill’s testimony about a Home Depot receipt for items allegedly used to dispose of Harmony.
Kayla Montgomery claims her husband Adam Montgomery used the lime to speed up Harmony’s decomposition, and used a power tool to cut up her then frozen body to make it fit in the bag that was her tomb.
“He told me he could put her in pieces,” Kayla Montgomery reportedly told investigators in 2023.
At this point in Harmony’s dreadful journey, February of 2020, the child’s corpse was being kept in a Catholic Medical Center tote bag given out to new mothers. That bag had spent weeks in the freezer at the Portland Pie Company, the pizza restaurant where Adam Montgomery worked at the time.
The Montgomery family that had been evicted in November of 2019 was living in an apartment on Union Street by February of 2020. Kayla Montgomery told police Adam Montgomery took Harmony’s corpse into the bathroom at the Union Street apartment to add lime, and then force her body back into the bag.
Rahill testified that investigators were trying to corroborate details from Kalya Montgomery’s latest version of Harmony’s fate when they sought verification about the bag of lime.
Detectives focused on the lime, requesting records of any limestone purchases from Home Depot stores in and around Manchester. At the same time, investigators were digging through Kayla and Adam Montgomery’s bank records.
Of the 33 Home Depot limestone purchases in the search, one happened on Feb. 26, 2022, at the March Avenue Home Depot in Manchester, Rahill testified. The 40-pound bag of crushed limestone was bought along with a cutting power tool known as a fuel finder, or angle grinder, a Diablo brand blade, and a battery. The total purchase was about $400 and paid in cash.
According to Rahill, 20 minutes before that Home Depot purchase, someone went to a nearby ATM on South Willow Street and withdrew $500 in cash from Kayla and Adam Montgomery’s checking account.
Detectives know that on Feb. 27, 2020, Adam Montgomery called the management at the Union Street apartment complex to report the bathroom drain was clogged.
Rahill acknowledged on the stand that investigators do not have any surveillance photos or video of Adam Montgomery withdrawing the cash or buying the lime and power tool at Home Depot 20 minutes later. By the time Kayla Montgomery disclosed the incident to police in 2022, the footage and photos had long been deleted.
Kayla Montgomery lied to investigators for close to a year about what happened to Harmony. No one knew that when the little girl was reported missing in December of 2021 she was already dead. At least, no one except Adam and Kayla Montgomery.
Whenever they were asked, the couple stuck to a story that Harmony had been returned to live with her birth mother in November of 2019. But Harmony’s mother, Crystal Sorey, is the person who reported her daughter missing in 2021 after not having seen her since 2018.
Adam Montgomery allegedly beat Harmony to death on Dec. 7, 2019, and then forced Kayla Montgomery to lie about the little girl’s fate. While Adam Montgomery admits he abused his daughter’s corpse in an effort to cover up her death, he denies killing her. Harmony’s body has never been found.